Her Pilgrim Soul

Kevin and Dan are two scientists who create a holographic projector. One day, the device starts generating images of a human fetus. The two watch as the fetus matures into a baby, a young girl, then a full grown woman, growing at a rate of ten years each day. They find out that Nola, as she calls herself, was once a young woman who lived in Westchester County, New York (near Hastings-On-Hudson) during the early twentieth century. They debate over whether or not Nola is a human soul somehow integrated into their hologram generator.

Kevin begins to fall in love with this creation. He spends more time at the lab than at home, and his troubled home life deteriorates as a result. Nola talks with Kevin about her father, and how he tried to keep her burgeoning intellect from blossoming. She asks Kevin about his estranged wife, causing him to recall with fondness how they first met. They discuss the poetry of Yeats. Nola relates meeting and falling in love with Robert, a kindred intellectual, which arouses Kevin's jealousy. During the fifth day of studying Nola, she reveals she is pregnant and then relives a miscarriage. Interviewing her acquaintances, Dan later discovers the miscarriage was the cause of Nola's death, and that Robert never forgave himself, dying of grief soon after.

As the holographic Nola ages and nears death she uses a voice modifier machine to call Kevin's wife Carol. Posing as Kevin, Nola tells her to come pick him up from the laboratory. In their final conversation, Nola reveals that Kevin is Robert reincarnated, his grief carried "into the next" life. Nola has finally been able to give him closure by experiencing the life he longed to have with her. He brings out the Yeats book and reads their favorite passage. Nola fades away as Kevin's wife enters the lab, and they have an emotional reunion. Carol is then quite surprised as a child's toy ball bounces out of the holographic chamber and into her hands.

And bending down beside the glowing bars, murmur, a little sadly, how love fled and paced upon the mountains overhead and hid her face amid a crowd of stars. A variation on William Butler Yeats to all those who have loved and lost, and loved again, on Earth or...in the Twilight Zone.

• List of The Twilight Zone (1985 TV series) episodes

The title comes from "When You Are Old", a poem by William Butler Yeats, a few lines of which are recited by Kevin just before Nola's farewell.

This story was made into a one-act stage musical by Alan Menken and paired with James Tiptree, Jr's "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" as a stage production titled Weird Romance: Two One Act Musicals of Speculative Fiction. The James Tiptree Jr. story "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" was made into an episode of the short-lived SCI FI Channel anthology series Welcome to Paradox.

• "Her Pilgrim Soul" at IMDb
• "Her Pilgrim Soul" at TV.com